Can cold fusion research survive pioneer's death?

Martin Fleischmann kick-started cold fusion controversy and faced decades of hostility. His colleague Michael McKubre ponders the future of the field

Science advances one funeral at a time, said Max Planck. Now Martin Fleischmann is gone, what's in store for cold fusion research?
I like that quote. It implies you've got to wait for the stubborn old bastards to die before you can make progress. But that wasn't Planck's intention: what he meant was that people refuse to even consider unorthodox arguments while their authors are still alive. Once they die, the argument becomes depersonalised. I do think there is an opportunity here. The hostility might abate because Martin is gone.

Fleischmann faced a backlash in 1989 when he and Stanley Pons said they had achieved fusion - the process that powers stars - in a lab. A bold claim that brought scorn for years.
They didn't really claim that. They claimed to have observed an anomalous excess of heat in a tabletop experiment - a palladium electrode loaded with heavy hydrogen, or deuterium. That heat was too great to be explained by chemistry. When Martin and Stan first wrote their paper, they had a question mark after the word fusion. That question mark was removed, apparently, in the review and editing process.

Was that such a big deal?
It was a sociological and possibly political mistake to call it fusion. Scientifically, it was a premature assertion. Whatever Martin and Stan had found and made public was not a cold version of "hot fusion", the kind familiar to nuclear physicists.

Is the distinction important?
Martin and Stan were laying claim to the idea that nuclear reactions occur in condensed matter - solids and liquids - in a manner different to free space, in hot plasmas. In nuclear physics, you've got two choices: fission and fusion. Fusion simply means the combining of light nuclei to make a bigger nucleus with a mass deficit, and that mass deficit shows up as heat. Today it's quite clear that there is some sort of fusion going on - but it is a fusion process that hitherto has not been considered by the mainstream physics community.

Why can't you say what that process is?
We need a good, sound theoretical model - then we can experimentally test it. We have a general idea of what's generating the heat, but the details - how deuterium nuclei get together to fuse - have yet to be resolved. The hot fusion folk who criticised cold fusion got one thing right: if it were a pairwise reaction of only two deuterium nuclei, like in free space, you should always see the same products as in hot fusion. But, generally, we don't see those types of products. A theoretical model is coming. I wouldn't be surprised if we have a good one in the next four or five months.

Do you think Fleischmann was a maverick?
I don't think he set out to be a maverick. Martin was just much more imaginative and inventive than your average scientist. When I was at the University of Southampton, I would see him in the corridor followed by graduate students and PhDs. Whatever their question, he could toss an answer over his shoulder. He was able to conjure up answers and ideas faster than anyone I've known.

Profile

Michael McKubre is an electrochemist who specialises in cold fusion at the independent, non-profit research institute SRI International in Menlo Park, California

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